Automated Installation of Excel Addin

[fannda]

Eviews Jan 2010 build
Windows 7 64 bit
Office 2007 32 bit

The supplied installation does not appear to install the Excel addin "Eviews Add In.xla"

I have created an automated packaged installation for Eviews but normal approaches to installing Excel addin are not working correctly in this case.
Typically adding HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Excel\Options\Open = "<path to addin>" causes an addin to be install and load for the user. In this case, however, the addin appears in the Active Application Add-ins list and is ticked in the Add-Ins selection dialog box BUT no menu appears. The menu only appears when the user manually ticks the Add-ins Selection dialog box and presses OK. It is this that we would like to avoid.

Thanks
Dave

[EViews Steve]

Dave:

Whenever Excel installs an add-in, it triggers the "AddinInstall" event in our add-in code. That event calls our "EV_ShowEViewsToolbar" macro to display the add-in menu that you should see in the menu toolbar (if you open up our add-in (using Excel VBA) and search for "AddinInstall", you see the code that does this).

I suspect that when you manually register the add-in in the registry without using Excel, this event in our add-in is not being run.

The only solution I'm aware of currently is to, instead, install the add-in for each user using Excel Automation (meaning you have to use Excel itself to install the add-in and not writing to the registry). Here's a link to a Microsoft site that discusses this: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/280290

Steve

[EViews Steve]

I should've mentioned that the "normal" way of installing Excel add-ins using the manual registry option is really only an option for COM-based Excel add-ins (usually DLLs). I believe .XLA add-ins must be loaded and initialized by Excel itself for it to work properly.

If you have a different XLA add-in that DOES work using your manual registry, do me a favor and send me to relevant VBA code (or even the XLA file itself) and I'll look into implementing a similar solution for ours. Of course, in this case, you could also implement the solution yourself by changing our VBA code...

Steve

[EViews Steve]

Ok, maybe I was wrong. I might have a solution for you.

Download this new version of the XLA file and see if it fixes your issue:
http://eviewsupdates.s3.amazonaws.com/E ... d%20In.zip

Steve

[fannda]

Great! A working fix within 2 hours. Genius

Many Thanks
Dave